CURRENT POETRY: PERPETUAL REVOLUTION

Though poets don't write for the convenience
of theorists, and groupings are often discerned later, analysis
can still disclose themes that were powerful because so buried,
i.e. not recognized or questioned at the time. One such is the
negative aspect of European poetry:
what it leaves out.

The result has been a local thickening
as one aspect or another is taken up, but also an overall impoverishment
of theme and language, with poetry dividing into coterie groups
that each claim to have the essential truth.

Death of Truth

Pride in country and community,
a wish to explore, develop and identify with the aspirations of one's
fellow citizens, an abiding interest in the larger political and social
issues of the day and a commitment to the moral and religious qualities
that distinguish man from brute animals are all aspects of modern democratic
life, but they find scant expression in its poetry. Wordsworth's broodings
on the ineffable are preferred to his patriotic odes, {1} and Swinburne's
{2} urgent rhetoric is no more read today than William Watson's high-minded
effusions. {3} Even the Georgians {4} with their innocent depictions
of country life were decried by the Moderns, though what was substituted
was a good deal less real and relevant to the book-buying public. {5}
The New Criticism ushered in by Pound {6} and Eliot, {7} finding in
the admired poetry of the past so much that was no longer true, declared
that truth was not to be looked for in poetry. All that mattered were
the words on the page, and the ingenious skill with which they deployed.
The experience of historians was set aside, as was indeed that of readers
of historical romances, both of whom can remain happily suspended between
the past and present. What the New
Critics wanted were the unchanging laws
of science, and they adopted a language of tensions and psychology
without understanding the issues involved.

Poet as Social Outcast

Few of the accomplished poets of
the nineteenth century worked with the political and social concerns
of the day, and their influence waned as the public turned to those
who did: journalists, social commentators and reformers. {8} Rather
than accept that poetry had a duty to more fully and significantly represent
what is most human in us, and so return to the public arena, the later
nineteenth-century poets contended that poetry was not language used
to its fullest extent, but an altogether different way of using language.
Private study was their solution, and publication in small journals
that attracted little attention at the time but have since served to
canonize their authors: Leopardi,
Nerval, Mallarmé, etc.
{9} {10} Eloquence and oratory were things to despise, shams that obscured
the truth, as the realities of the First World War were soon to show.
{11} Poetry could no longer be written in high-minded diction, or perhaps
at all after the horrors of the Second World War. In fact it was the
cold efficiency of state organization that had so vastly increased,
{12} but poets did not read history, or perhaps much philosophy, as
some hazardous simplifications were made in identifying man's true nature
with his most elementary.

Refuge
in the Irrational

Naturally, as they turned
from the public to the private sphere, poets encountered the inner
doubts and confusions known to writers from antiquity, but which
had recently been organized into theories by Sigmund
Freud. If standing and influence in the outside world was
denied them, poets could explore and colonize the vast realms
of the unconscious, founding empires to which every reader had
access. They did not wish to know how bogus, trivializing and
ineffective was psychoanalysis in practice, but only that it opened
doors to vivid expression. Everything was permitted if words were
cover for unedifying desires, and a profusion of sects and movements
sprang up: Imagism, Crane's
symbolism, Pound's ideograms,
Surrealism {13} and
the Deep Image School, {14} Dadaism,
Thomas's Welsh rhetoric, {15} Romantic revivals in America {16}
and England, {17} confessional poetry {18} and poetry that spoke
to ethnic and socially disadvantaged groups. {19} Barely keeping
up with it came theory: Foucault,
Lacan, Derrida
and others. In vain were the difficulties of such views set out
to them, as they knew that language was an inherently deceptive
but yielding, and could therefore be made to say anything they
pleased.

Rejection
of the Past

No doubt the new approaches
challenged what poetry had once been, but the new practitioners
rewrote history. Poetry had always been contemporary, they argued,
which now meant being direct, personal and American. Great poetry
had in fact been more than that, but the proponents of popular
Modernism  William Carlos Williams, the Black
Mountain School, Beat
Poets and the San Franciscans  had answers ready. Poetry
must be unmediated if sincere, and the techniques of verse were
a handicap to expression. They remembered Pound's "make it
new", and asserted that a more democratic age must have a
more democratic poetry. And lest anyone think their work trivial,
they wrapped matters up in a complex phraseology, redefining the
elements of verse in startling ways. {20} Theoretical scaffolding
became a necessary part of contemporary poetry, {21} the more
so as the floodgates were soon to be opened in schools and writing
classes throughout the country. Excellence lay in what authorities
could be quoted, and the theoretical considerations accessible
in a poem. {22} {23}

Poetry
As Special Use of Language

But if poetry had now focused on
speculative elements of language, it was also necessary
to stress the devious if not altogether treacherous aspects
of this medium, how much it was subject to outmoded historical
precedent, to unseen political manoeuverings by special
interest groups, and to hapless realism from the masses.
{24} Poetry therefore splintered further, retreating to
coteries with their own perspectives. {25} Geoffrey Hill
agonizes over the complicity of words with man's savagery
in the historical record. {26} John Ashbery creates extended
jokes on and with language. {27} Postmodernists of the Prynne
school keep to narrow descriptions of physical sensation
and avoid portentous statement. And the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e
school poets send up the whole process of writing anything
significant beyond the sheer pleasure of being alive, though
pretending otherwise. {28}

Concluding
Thoughts

So arose the present scene, a vast medley
of communities, all sharing some beliefs and working practices,
and uniting round common problems, but still competing for attention,
status and economic livelihood. Perhaps that is only natural, and
anthropologists often picture communities
as successive waves of invaders interbreeding with earlier peoples
but also dispersing them to more difficult terrain, where their
gene-drift gradually makes them more distinctive but also less productive.
{29} Today, if we include those submitting to poetry.com and similar
sites, we find poets working small fragments of a great tradition
and sometimes taking them as the whole truth.

How these communities appear  or the
extent to which they exist at all  depends on the criteria
we use, the fineness of our distinctions, what we think is important.
Many caveats apply. The groupings above are ad hoc, and have not
been objectively
derived (e.g. through cluster analysis or other statistical approach.
{30} {31})